In today's fast-paced business environment, events play a critical role in driving brand awareness, lead generation, and customer engagement. However, with so many different types of events available, it can be challenging to understand how to effectively leverage them to drive marketing success. 

In this post, we'll explore 5 ways to map your events to your marketing funnel to ensure that they are aligned with your overall business goals and objectives by channelling expert insights from seasoned event marketer, Kelsey Taylor, who recently joined us for a webinar as part of our Event Heroes series!

1. Let your event goal dictate your format

One important factor that will help you determine your event format is the objective of your event, says Kelsey. In other words, defining the desired outcome of the event will inform you about which format will help you achieve it best.

“If you're launching a new product or have new features to share, a webinar either pre-recorded or live is a great way to deliver this message especially to your customers.”

2. Use the crawl-walk-run approach to mixing event formats

When asked about whether there’s an ideal stage at which companies should consider mixing up their event formats, Kelsey recommended starting with simple, low-stakes events, and gradually increasing the complexity and scale of events over time. This can help organizations to build the necessary skills and infrastructure to successfully execute larger, more complex events in the future. 

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“You can look at what’s working really well across your marketing functions, and where you see places where you can insert something different and test things out.”

3. Think long-term when it comes to attendee experience

When asked about how to create attendees who will want to continually engage with your brand, Kelsey’s pertinent advice was to think beyond just one event and rather view each event as part of a larger audience-building process.

“Continuing to think strategically and take into consideration and take good care of your attendees no matter what they attend will build that obsessive brand for your events.“

4. Your average deal size can help you determine your event budget

While there is no rule of thumb when it comes to setting your event budget in stone, Kelsey recommends using your average deal size as an indicator while formulating your event budget.

“If we're going to have 10 people at an event and an average deal size of let's say ten thousand dollars, we need to have at least double that in the room to make it worth it.”

5. Ensure your event content is actionable

While tracing the evolution of event needs, Kelsey highlighted that the bar for events is much higher compared to pre-COVID times, as attendees have limited time to offer to events, and that they’ll only look for events that give them tactical value.

“We want to ensure that we're delivering valuable actionable insights that they can take back to their teams and implement immediately, again no matter the format. 

There isn't really anything worse than attending an event and really not finding any value in it!”

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Zuddl is a unified platform for events and webinars that helps event marketers plan and execute events that drive growth. The platform has clients across the globe, such as the United Nations, Kellogg’s, Microsoft, HSBC, VMware, Google, StackCommerce and Cipla amongst others. In January 2022, Zuddl announced that it closed $13.35 mn in Series A funding.